Plasma-wakefield accelerators driven by intense particle beams promise to significantly reduce the size of future high-energy facilities. Such applications require particle beams with a well-controlled energy spectrum, which necessitates detailed tailoring of the plasma wakefield. Precise measurements of the effective wakefield structure are therefore essential for optimising the acceleration process. Here we propose and demonstrate such a measurement technique that enables femtosecond-level (15 fs) sampling of longitudinal electric fields of order gigavolts-per-meter (0.8 GV m⁻¹). This method—based on energy collimation of the incoming bunch—made it possible to investigate the effect of beam and plasma parameters on the beam-loaded longitudinally integrated plasma wakefield, showing good agreement with particle-in-cell simulations. These results open the door to high-quality operation of future plasma accelerators through precise control of the acceleration process.

The successful realization of high gain free-electron lasers has opened new possibilities to X-ray scientists for investigating matter in different states. The availability of unprecedented photon properties stimulated the development of new experimental techniques capable of taking full advantage of these options and has started a virtuous collaboration between machine experts and photon users to improve further and optimize the generated X-ray pulses. Over the recent years, this has led to the development of several advanced free-electron laser (FEL) schemes to tailor the photon properties to specific experimental demands. Presently, tunable wavelength X-ray pulses with extremely high brilliance and short pulse characteristics are a few of the many options available at FELs. Few facilities can offer options such as narrowband or extremely short pulses below one fs duration and simultaneous pulses of multiple colors enabling resonant X-ray pump—X-ray probe experiments with sub fs resolution. Fully coherent X-ray radiation (both spatial and temporal) can also be provided. This new option has stimulated the application of coherent control techniques to the X-ray world, allowing for experiments with few attoseconds resolution. FELs often operate at a relatively low repetition rate, typically on the order of tens of Hz. At FLASH and the European XFEL, however, the superconducting accelerators allow generating thousands of pulses per second. With the implementation of a new seeded FEL line and with an upgrade at FLASH linac, all the new features will become available in the soft X-ray spectral range down to the oxygen K edge with unprecedented average photon flux due to the high repetition rate of pulses.

Current FEL development efforts aim at improving the control of coherence at high repetition rate while keeping the wavelength tunability. Seeding schemes, like HGHG and EEHG, allow for the generation of fully coherent FEL pulses, but the powerful external seed laser required limits the repetition rate that can be achieved. In turn, this impacts the average brightness and the amount of statistics that experiments can do. In order to solve this issue, here we take a unique approach and discuss the use of one or more optical cavities to seed the electron bunches accelerated in a superconducting linac to modulate their energy. Like standard seeding schemes, the cavity is followed by a dispersive section, which manipulates the longitudinal phase space of the electron bunches, inducing longitudinal density modulations with high harmonic content that undergo the FEL process in an amplifier placed downstream. We will discuss technical requirements for implementing these setups and their operation range based on numerical simulations.

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-20676-1